F6: Population Dynamics and Socio-environmental Transformation

Archaeodemography has been a steadily growing field since the 1970s and combines anthropological, ecological, ethnographic, and archaeological methods to make statements about prehistoric populations. It focus not only on population size, but also on age and sex ratios, fertility, mortality of a population, as well as immigration and emigration as basal variables of demography.

The main objective of subproject F6 is, on the one hand, the reconstruction of population development and dynamics, which are important for socio-ecological change in the local, regional and supra-regional context and, on the other hand, the reconstruction of the relationship between demography and environmentally relevant, technological, social and cultural developments. The focus is on the development of methods for the recording of archaeo-demographic processes and variables, which also makes use of modern demographic modeling (e.g. multi-state models).

Fig. 1: The chronological framework of the sociospatial development of Vráble (→ C2) with consideration of the demographic development.

The F6 project benefits greatly from the data collection and research that happened in the 1st phase of SFB 1266. We will pick up the threads and examine existing local and supra-regional case studies with an explicit focus on the transformative forces of demographic development (see Fig. 1) or how environmental and social changes influenced demography. Taking this further, F6 will examine the contextual factors that influence basic demographic variables (fertility, mortality, migration) in order to contribute to a better understanding of reconstructed population trends.